Community Building and Young People

Andy Smith and Pat Black of Diversity Matters explain more about Go Deep.

Go Deep is a game and a journey.

It was created to try and answer a question:

How to help teams and groups find more sustainable ways to work together, create community and transform neighbourhoods?

The game is designed for teams of young-people to find out more about themselves and community.

It will soon be downloadable online and consists of a set of cards, a facilitator’s guide book and a participant journal.

There are three phases of the game:

Getting Ready build awareness about talents, dreams and resources in the team and community.

A choice of 6 metro lines, lead the team through a series of challenges that engage the wider community. Each metro line ends with a challenge to create community action or transformation.

Arrival consolidates the learning, focusses on continuing, dreaming anew and re-evoles into the next stages.

Go Deep contains the key ingredients of a game, challenges, rewards, celebration and fun. Through playing, people increase the knowledge of community, grow their membership and over two to three days create community actions and changes.

The game builds on two existing methodologies; Oasis is a community transformation game developed by Elos in Brazil; Processwork is a facilitation method, developed Arnold Mindell and others, emphasises emotional awareness, conflict and growth at the individual, group and wider society levels. “Elos” in Portuguese means “links” and stands for the power of transformative relationships made in the course of community change.

The Oasis Game has been played well over 300 times and involved over 25,000 people so far in many countries. Processwork uses methods like Deep Democracy to help groups and communities create more awareness, understanding and feasible change.

So, the Go Deep game was formed, involving facilitators and community leaders from 5 countries using experience from both methodologies. Workshops were held in Scotland, Spain and the Netherlands involving and gathering the expertise of young-people and youth leaders. We thought together about how to keep the energy up after initial changes and how to deal with conflicts that arise when any community starts to use and mobilise its assets. The first version was run in Puglia in the south of Italy in October 2016. In the video, facilitators, volunteers and local citizens talk about their experiences.

Version 3 is now in preparation and games have been played in various localities in Italy and Spain while more are planned in other countries including some in Scotland this summer.